Shazam!

Shazam! was that early television character, Gomer Pyle's exclamation of surprise ... and also the word that the comic book super hero, Captain Marvel, used to change (at the speed of a lightning bolt) his mufti into his orange tights and cape. But, in this case, it is used to describe the incredibly fast speed of quantum interaction ... far faster than the speed of light. As you can read in the following NBC News Story, "entangled" photons (or other atomic particles) exhibit "spooky" interactions (an Einstein term) of their polarizations, even when separated by great distances. The speed of these interactions is as near to instantaneously as can be measured ... and is clearly a puzzlement.

I love to imagine why such things occur. Is this a suggestion of more than four dimensions to our world?  Perhaps the laws of physics are just temporary ... and might change tomorrow?  To me, these are the kind of teasers that keep science moving forward.  When, some years hence, we fully understand how this marvel works, we will have uncovered, in the process, other mysteries even more bizarre. And this really is what makes our animal species unique.  Instead of we humans sighing ... and lounging like a cat in the sunlight, we try to discover an even newer truth ... or disprove an old one. And I think we, in our hearts, understand that we never will understand the ultimate reality.  But that doesn't stop us from this eternal quest.